Why are Man Tools Always Better Than Girl Tools?

I’m sitting here today, wondering if I’m stupid.

Something like 18 years ago, I bought a Ridgid shop vac. It looks like it has leprosy. The surface of the plastic case is badly faded. I don’t know what caused this. Apparently, this particular plastic fades with time, and the texture roughens.

This is the only thing wrong with it.

I have used it on machining chips, all sorts of metal debris, sawdust, wood chips, leaves, dirt, bugs, and wet spills. I have used it as a spot cleaner on furniture, wetting the fabric with window cleaner and then sucking it out. I have failed to clean the filter for years on end. Nothing bothers it.

It is reasonable to expect this vacuum to continue working for at least another 30 years without repairs.

You can buy a similar Ridgid for under $130.

Move forward to September of 2022.

I thought I should man up, spend serious money, and get a real house vacuum cleaner. I already had an Electrolux, and it was okay, but the cord rewind mechanism was broken, somehow the main floor attachment had gotten lost, and it was a canister vacuum I had to drag around. I wanted an upright.

The Electrolux had its good points. It was very quiet. It was light. It seemed to do an okay job. But I had to drag it, and Electrolux is extremely feeble when it comes to parts. I had to buy a Chinese floor attachment. Electrolux discontinued the cord retractor, which is a part that fails frequently.

I bought a Shark upright for the low, low sale price of $429.

How can a vacuum cleaner cost $429? That’s a great question. A motor and a cheap body, all made in Asia. You can get a canister vacuum from another respected manufacturer for around $120, so what’s up with Shark?

It’s supposed to have unusually powerful suction. I’ll give it that. It does. Other than that, it’s just bells and whistles, like the motor that speeds up when the vacuum sees more dirt in front of it. Personally, I want my vacuum to run fast all the time. I am offended by products that charge me extra to save energy, unless they save me serious money.

Do you hate it when your TV turns itself off when you leave the room? Me, too.

Like just about everything these days, the Shark came with a proprietary part which has to be replaced regularly. It’s a fragrance cartridge. You put it in the base, and until it runs out of irritating chemicals, it makes your house smell like the perfume counter at Target. Shark charges $13 each, and you have to buy two at a time. Market price for knockoffs: two dollars and change.

The only reason I keep the original cartridge in my machine is to block the hole it fits in. I’m afraid leaving it open will kill the suction. I don’t care about running out of perfume.

I also have a Shark cordless upright, which I will defend. It works very well for what it is, and it’s convenient. It’s no match for a powerful vacuum, but it handles most types of dirt with acceptable success.

The Sharks work pretty well. The corded job sucks like crazy, and the cordless one is probably stronger than my Electrolux. They both choke on anything bigger than 3/4″, though, and wet spills will ruin them.

When a Shark chokes, you have to take the filthy floor part apart. Lovely experience.

Move forward to 2025.

Louis Rossmann is one of my favorite Youtubers. He runs a big electronics repair business in Texas. He used to operate in New York City, but he left because he couldn’t take it any more. New York treats business owners like criminals.

Now that I think about it, it treats criminals like business owners.

Rossmann is big in the right-to-repair movement. He got his start while servicing Apple products.

Apple is one of the most ruthless, immoral, greedy, dishonest companies on Earth. Apple will not give repairmen schematics and OEM parts, and it cheats customers who need repairs.

Apple has a history of cheating us silly, not just with inflated initial costs, but with dishonest repair bills. If you take your Apple product to an Apple repair center with a problem that can be fixed with a cheap part or a cleaning, there is a good chance they will lie to you and tell you to buy a new product.

Forcing people to buy new products is not a small wrong. It’s a big deal when a repair that should cost $35 turns into a $1500 purchase. We’re not all as rich as Tim Cook.

Rossmann saw the replacement swindle more than once, and he was frustrated because he had to find technical documents through back channels. He also had to buy real Apple parts this way, and he had to use questionable aftermarket parts in some repairs.

Now he puts out video after video about RTR, and he goes after companies other than Apple. One of his big beefs right now concerns unwanted ads. Example: Samsung just started forcing refrigerator owners to put up with ads on their fridge doors. They bought the fridges with no ads, Samsung updated the software without consulting them, and now they get annoying commercials while trying to get bologna for sandwiches.

He’s mad at Shark right now because a customer needed new wheels for a 6-month-old machine, and Shark construed its own warranty, which they try to tell us is generous, to exclude just about everything except the motor.

In a recent video, Rossman told the world about his home vacuum: a Ridgid shop vac.

It’s cheap. It’s powerful. You can get attachments to make it work indoors like a home vacuum. It can suck up just about anything, wet or dry. It has a huge capacity.

Need a part? Ridgid will sell it to you. They have a big selection of parts on their site, and Home Depot stocks a lot of parts.

I ruled out shop vacs for indoor use a long time ago, assuming they had to be unsuitable. I guess I was wrong.

Watching Rossman, I tried to rationalize my spending. I thought, “Well, it won’t work on floors. The primitive floor things on my two shop vacs are made for things like garages.” No; you can buy a floor attachment which will actually work. It’s simple and cheap, and it won’t give you a pretty LED light show, but it does work.

I kept trying to defend my expenditures. I said, “It won’t filter the air nearly as well as a Shark. It has no HEPA filter.”

There are problems with that notion.

1. Houses and buildings used to get very clean without HEPA filters. I think the initialism “HEPA” is just a tool to make you feel bad about not spending more money, unless you have some kind of freak allergy. You probably shouldn’t breathe dust while sanding drywall, but the stuff that collects on your exercise bike will not send you to the ER.

2. Ridgid sells HEPA filters for their vacuums.

The video made me think about wet spills.

I have a baby. He poops. He throws up. He spills stuff. My $429 Shark will not help me with any of that.

I have two Rug Doctor shampoo machines. I have the big one for floors and the little one for furniture and stairs. I got them years ago when I was looking after my dad. He spilled stuff. I guess I have $350 invested in these machines.

If I wanted to, I could spray cleaning solution on big carpet spills, suck it out with a Ridgid, and get things just as clean as the Rug Doctors would. I could do this for furniture and stairs, too.

Using a Rug Doctor is unpleasant. You have to fill a clean-fluid tank and then remove and clean out a dirty-fluid tank. Your hands get involved with the filth way too much. With a shop vac, you just carry it outside, pull the lid, dump the water, and put the lid back on.

Here is the thought rolling around in my head: while the big Rug Doctor is superior for shampooing wall-to-wall carpet, a shop vac is better for every other kind of spill.

If I cared enough, I could use a pump sprayer to apply fluid to rugs and then suck it out with a shop vac. Something to consider.

You can’t clean a dirty carpet with a Rug Doctor until you vacuum it. I know this, because I had to take a Rug Doctor apart to remove dog hair after a friend abused it. A shop vac loves dog hair. And nails. And rocks.

The big Rug Doctor is designed to break down. It uses a water pump to shoot cleaning solution onto rugs. The pump is not designed to resist corrosion well. Every so often, the pumps quit, and they have to be replaced. This is a nightmare job. I did it recently.

The little Rug Doctor probably has the same problem. I am waiting for it. If it happens, I’ll probably take it to the dump.

It appears to be a machine with no legimitate reason to exist.

I don’t think a Ridgid cordless can replace a Shark cordless. I have a really good Ridgid cordless I got for sucking goo out of air conditioners. You have to carry it like a suitcase. The suction doesn’t seem all that impressive. Maybe I’m wrong, though.

Shop vacs are incredibly loud, so that’s a problem, but it’s nothing earmuffs can’t fix.

It looks like I spent hundreds of dollars buying myself unnecessary problems. Something to think about for the future.

MORE

I checked, and it appears the Ridgid WD0319 cordless shop vac sucks considerably harder than a cordless Shark Stratos and runs a lot longer on one charge. It lacks motorized rollers and so on, however, and the Shark may seal to rugs better.

I doubt the business about the Shark sealing better, since you can get a rug attachment for a Ridgid.

Tallow Facts for the Callow

Now that I’ve found a good source of affordable beef fat for the deep fryer, I am learning more about french fries.

Interesting fact: while most people think the “french” in “french fries” comes from Belgium, where American soldiers encountered fries and thought they were eating them in France, it may be that the “french” actually refers to a “french cut,” which means “julienned.”

This makes sense to me, since Americans are not really stupid enough to think Belgium is France.

Belgium is generally considered to be the top nation for fry excellence. They have all sorts of shops and stands selling thick fries.

There is a ton of fry folklore out there, and I have fallen for most of it at one time or another. I am here to post the current state of my knowledge.

I’ll list myths and then debunk them. Hopefully, I will not have to come back in a month and debunk the debunking.

1. You have to use Dutch Bintje potatoes for fries. If this were true, there would be no great American french fries, but there are. Maybe Bintje potatoes are better, but you can’t have them, so what difference does it make? The standard US potato is the russet. I have seen Kennebec potatoes recommended, as well as Yukon Golds.

2. You must rinse or soak your fries before frying them. The big problem with this myth is the existence of many Youtube videos featuring professional Belgian fry fryers who don’t rinse or soak fries. Belgium has factories that do nothing but cut potatoes into fries and put them in bags. Fry cooks dump the bags right into fryers. Rinsing and soaking aren’t necessary. I read about an exception for Yukon Golds, which need a rinse to prevent them from getting gummy.

3. Good fries should be cooked twice (not necessarily a myth, although there are dissenters), and you have to refrigerate or even freeze them between sessions. Belgians don’t use refrigeration. They cook fries at around 300° until the appearance gets dull, and then they dump them on shelves near their fryers. Then they fry them again at a higher temperature.

4. Plant-based oils are good for making fries. They’re just not. This absurd notion has been forced on us by vegans and other woke (i.e. mentally ill) people whose biases have nothing to do with making good food. Animal fat makes fries taste better, and it gives them more crunch. I know Five Guys uses peanut oil, and people think they know what they’re doing, but their fries would be better if they used the correct type of fat.

Five Guys is a business, so they want to maximize profits. I dont’ care about that. If Five Guys goes to real fat, the cost will go up a little, and whatever self-righteous vegans are currently buying their fries will stop. I think this is why they use cheap oil.

Food chains claim they use bad plant oils because of health concerns. Yeah. That’s why they serve McFlurries, Frostys, McMuffins, double cheeseburgers, and 50 kinds of sugar drinks. It’s why Culver’s serves fried cheese. Thanks for looking out for us, boys.

Could a lie be more obvious?

“We’re still running a whorehouse, but now every room comes with a Gideon Bible!”

Some restaurants are going back to beef fat now; notably Steak ‘n’ Shake, Outback, and Popeyes.

I now have 50 pounds of beef fat, which is the absolute best affordable frying medium. I paid about $1.40 per pound. I am getting ready to dump the peanut oil from my deep fryer, fill it with beef fat, and live the dream.

I came up with a plan, based on numerous sources. It’s for fat Belgian-style fries around 3/8″ thick. I generally like thinner fries, but I’m going to give the big ones a shot.

1. Cut russet potatoes to size, leaving the skins on.

2. Blanch at 300° until the shine goes away.

3. Rest for 45 minutes. I’ll probably just lift the fryer basket out of the fat and let it sit atop the fryer.

4. Fry at 350° until done. Belgians say the fries will “sing” at this point, meaning the frying noise takes on a higher pitch. I have also noticed that their fries float.

My feeling is that I should do what Belgians do and avoid doing what they don’t do.

The sad thing is that there are “authentic” Belgian fry recipes out there that tell people to soak or rinse potatoes. Why lie like that? People are really something.

If you don’t want to take the trouble of cutting up potatoes and frying them twice, I have good news. I learned that frozen fries are generally blanched before packing. I’ve tried some, and I found that Great Value crinkle-cut fries from Walmart are better than Ore-Ida fries that cost more. If you use Great Value fries, you’re really frying twice, and you’re also satisfying the characters who claim fries need to be frozen.

I won’t say Walmart fries are the best fries around, but they’re exactly like just about all the crinkle-cut fries you’ve ever enjoyed, and they save you some work.

Maybe I’ll get around to making fries later in the week.

I Ham Almost Finished

The final contestant in my country ham tournament of champions came yesterday, and I tried it this morning: Benton’s, from Tennessee.

I received 4 center slices with the bones removed. They were packed in vacuum bags. They came with directions that said to fry them for no more than 30 seconds on a side. You really need to have some grease standing by to get away with that. You need grease to provide thermal contact between the ham and the pan.

I fried a slice without water or grease, and then I used water to deglaze the pan and make a little red eye gravy. Then my wife and I tried the ham.

The bad: it’s salty. Somewhere between Newsom’s, which is fine, and Broadbent’s, which is too salty right out of the box. The slices were too thin at around 5/32″. It’s just a wee bit tough.

The good: classic country ham flavor, although not as pronounced as Newsom’s.

If I were going to go with Benton’s, I would buy a whole ham, slice it thicker, soak the slices for two days, and bag and freeze it. That would kill the excess salt and add moisture. I don’t think it would produce the nice texture Newsom’s has, however.

Maybe Benton’s would agree to sell thicker ham slices. That would be a good deal, because a sliced ham is only ten dollars more than an intact ham.

Benton’s says its hams are 9-10 months old on average, so call it 9. They sell older hams, too. Newsom’s starts at one year, which may explain a lot.

Curing is what makes a ham safe to eat. It takes a few weeks. After that, you can stick a ham in your unrefrigerated closet for a year without problems. It would continue to age and improve, as long as you didn’t overdo it. As I have said before, this could be a good way to avoid Newsom’s high prices and still get the same experience.

Benton’s has an interesting option: deboned hams that have not been sliced. I can get this for $133, which is not bad. They include the bones and trimmed bits, which is very important, because they are useful in soups and greens.

Yesterday, I used the bones from my Newsom’s ham to make Great Northern beans, and the result was glorious. I got rid of some of my unwanted Broadbent’s slices by using them in collard greens, and I made cornbread with a little bit of the grease from the beans. Food doesn’t get much better.

As I have often said, the price of ingredients has nothing to do with the pleasure food gives you. A really good pot of beans with cornbread on the side is as good as nearly anything, anywhere.

The beans cost me $3.98. The onions ran around $1.50.

The ham was so salty, I didn’t have to add salt to either dish.

I had some Oberholtzer’s sorghum syrup from Liberty, Kentucky, and I put it on buttered cornbread. You really have to try this combination to understand how good it is.

My cousin tells me my aunt now recommends Townsend’s sorghum, but they charge so much for shipping, I am not planning to try it. A Tennessee company called Muddy Pond will send you 64 ounces for $48, shipping included. That’s interesting.

It looks like my best sorghum deal is about twice as expensive as my best maple syrup deal, unless you count the $24 half-gallon of maple syrup I got at Rural King. That was an amazing buy.

Ronni Lundy, who wrote a very authentic Appalachian cookbook, recommends Oberholtzer’s and Muddy Pond. I trust her judgment. I’m going to try some Muddy Pond, since I am low on Oberholtzer’s.

I don’t see why it shouldn’t be possible for anyone with sorghum cane to make good syrup. You just boil the juice and bottle it.

Current tournament rankings: 1. Newsom’s, 2. Meacham, 3. Penn, 4. Benton’s. Broadbent’s is disqualified because I felt it was in a lower tier even after two tries.

It’s hard to be certain about the 1-2 and 3-4 rankings. They’re close, and besides, country hams are not completely consistent, so I can’t be sure I got hams that represent their companies perfectly.

I’m pretty sure Broadbent’s is not for me.

When I used to order Gatton Farms and Scott hams, things were simple. I got pretty much what I wanted.

The more I look at country ham, the more I think I should try curing one. It just has to survive a few weeks in my fermenting fridge. After that, I can put it anywhere.

The idea of buying a relatively cheap ham, meaning one that isn’t aged much, and letting it age in my laundry room is also tempting.

I guess I could even take a slice of Newsom’s ham and rub the rind on a new ham to transfer the correct mold.

Anyway, I’m nearly done with the ham tournament. I just have to try all the winners at one sitting.

I’m looking forward to getting it over with. When you eat a lot of country ham, the salt makes you retain water, and it wants to come out at 2 a.m. And 3 a.m. And 4 a.m.

Mild but Tasty

My country ham tournament of champions continues.

I have tried hams from Newsom’s, Meacham, Broadbent’s, and, today, Penn.

Newsom’s is just about perfect. I wish it were not. It’s expensive.

Meacham is very good, but it has a little bit of unique flavor that is not exactly like the hams I ate as a kid. It’s hard to say whether Newsom’s or Meacham is better.

Broadbent’s hams are very salty. The flavor is just okay. I received two packages. The first slices were too tough, salty, and lacking in flavor for me. The second bunch were not as tough or salty, but they were still saltier and tougher than I would have liked, so Broadbent’s is out.

A package from Penn Country Hams arrived. I ordered a half ham. What I really got was between three and four pounds of big boneless slices in vacuum bag inside an insulating bag with one of those synthetic ice pack things in it.

The meat was already warm, but they tried.

I ate plenty of country ham when I was young, and I believe I know what a quintessential Kentucky ham tastes like. As an adult, I used to get them from outfits named Gatton Farms and Scott Hams, and they were pretty much like the hams my grandmother and great uncle cured. That’s the kind of ham I want. The best? That’s subject to debate. It’s what I like. It’s what my grandmother and her brother liked. It’s good.

When I cut the bag open, the ham gave off kind of a barnyard smell. Some hams are like that. It’s almost like manure. In some cases, it’s a great deal like manure. I won’t eat Smithfield-brand hams because the manure smell is about all you get.

It also smelled sort of like peanuts.

A sticker on the bag says “8 Months Old.”

I fried a Penn slice. I didn’t bother with water or bacon grease.

This ham is pretty tender for country ham. It also has a fair amount of fat, although I would say Newsom’s and Meacham probably have more.

Newsom’s falls apart in your mouth like aged steak. I like that. This ham was easy to chew, but it was not the same.

On the salt scale, I would say it’s similar to Newsom’s. Just fine.

The flavor is milder than Newsom’s and Meacham. A good ham has an acidic umami flavor nothing else seems to have. Newsom’s hams nail it. Meacham is close. The Penn slice had less of it.

The ham had a peanutty aftertaste my wife and I both noticed.

I believe this would be a great ham for someone who is scared of real country ham. It’s the real thing, but the move from city ham to this ham is a little less jarring than it would be for other hams.

The verdict: delicious, but not quite what I’m looking for. Newsom’s is a bullseye. Meacham is close, and I think the quality is the same, but it also has that signature Meacham scent. Not bad, but not quite what I’m used to. I’m not just looking for great ham. I’m looking for nostalgia.

This is excellent ham. Eating it is not exactly a hardship. I won’t buy it again, though, because Newsom’s and Meacham are closer to what I want.

Your Typical American Way of Life is Destroying You

The reason we should have continued the unconstitutional banning of open carry in Florida is that we knew that if the ban were dropped, there would be chaos in the streets caused by people carrying guns openly and legally.

This is what millions of leftists told us, including leftists in open-carry states like Washington, Wisconsin, and Oregon, where no such chaos has ever developed.

It has been over two weeks since the first police departments stopped enforcing the carry ban, and here’s a comprehensive list of all the shocking incidents in which nuts used open carry to create public disturbances:

In case you weren’t paying attention, here is the list again:

Even I was overly pessimistic. I figured surely I would see a few patriots carrying openly during the first days of carry freedom, but it didn’t happen.

On the down side, the most combative, irritable element of the 2A population segment is now insisting open carry is now legal in Florida’s “prohibited places,” meaning schools, courthouses and so on.

They have a point. The law listing these places expressly refers to concealed carry permit holders, and it doesn’t even say there is a ban. It says the law doesn’t allow permit holders to carry openly or concealed in these places, and that’s not the same thing as banning it.

Weirdly, the part about open carry only mentions pistols, so I guess the door is open for some brave soul to go to a police station with a rifle on a sling.

Another interesting wrinkle: federal law also creates prohibited places, and Florida can’t override the federal ban. A federal court in a different part of the country recently held that the ban in post offices was unconstitutional, but given the way federal law is changing, I doubt that will help anyone in Florida right away.

My understanding (from not reading the opinion) is that the relevant case struck down all “federal facility” bans. Does that include military bases? You have to wonder. Soldiers can’t carry guns, but I can?

The post office ban is stupid. Nobody robs post offices. Granted, given past behavior, it might be a good idea to disarm employees preemptively, but most of the rest of us have the good sense to commit our crimes in places like banks, trailer parks, and liquor stores.

Where carrying weapons is legal.

It’s also illegal to carry a gun into an Amtrak station. First of all, who goes into an Amtrak station? Second, who robs trains? Jesse James is dead, people. “Hands up! Give me all your stale, half-eaten dinner rolls and empty Dasani bottles!”

Here’s a great law: although you can wander around in a national park armed (because many people find guns helpful when hunting) if you have to relieve yourself, you have to go behind a tree, because going into a mens’ room with a gun is a felony.

You can always leave your gun outside and hope kids don’t pick it up.

Squat on footpath so people step in it: model citizen. Sit on toilet behind locked door: felony.

All federal buildings in national parks are off-limits. I guess a lot of thought went into that law.

It’s like they just said, “We’re still stinging from the passage of the Bill of Rights, and here’s a chance to get even!”

In news which is less irrelevant to me, I keep getting wonderful revelation.

God has been teaching me a lot about holiness. I believe that most people think “holiness” means standing around with a stupid grin on your face, holding two fingers in the air and glowing like a giant lightning bug. Believe it or not, that is wrong. It just means a state of separation and dedication to God. It means you reject the world’s culture and adopt the culture of heaven, because you choose to belong to God’s family.

I used to have the feeling that holiness meant giving up everything that is enjoyable for the purpose of scoring points to get me into heaven. That is not correct, either.

Holiness removes evil spirits and curses from your life, reducing your problems and your suffering. It brings you closer to God and other Christians, increasing your blessings and making you safer.

Satan has salted our culture with poison to make us weak and corrupt and open holes so demons can enter us.

Secular entertainment, including sports, is a real problem. Even seemingly-innocent shows and songs lead to captivity. Entertainment teaches us that fornication, which God says is abomination, is fine. It tells us normal people don’t pray or acknowledge Yeshua during their daily lives. It endorses perversion and cruelty. It glamorizes violence. It promotes drug use, including the use of steroids. Those big, buff actors you’re used to seeing, who used to look like Rob Schneider, didn’t get that way from eating chicken, broccoli, and rice for two months. Wake up.

Dwayne Johnson is on steroids. Face it. Well, he was. Now he’s down about 50 pounds. He reached the age where his doctor told him to knock it off, but he continues to lie and say he didn’t take anything. He has blocked arteries, and steroids cause that.

Shia Leboeuf admits he used steroids; he went from 165 to 220 to 165. Alan Ritchson uses drugs. All sorts of movie henchmen and goons use steroids.

Arnold Schwarzenegger. Dolph Lundgren. Mickey Rourke. Dave Bautista. Even Charlie Sheen and Suzanne Somers used PED’s.

Hugh Jackman definitely used drugs to play Wolverine. He looked better at 55 than anyone reading this blog will ever look at 30 with the best regimen imaginable and no drugs.

People are calling the Rock “the pebble” now. He looks thin, like the new, de-juiced Dave Bautista. He claims he lost weight to play a role, but he’s not going to bulk up again, unless he does it briefly to “debunk” the steroid stories. He’s not going back to long-term juicing, because it could kill him.

Even reality-TV (oxymoron) personalities use drugs. Celebrity chef Robert Irvine’s biceps suddenly fell off a year or two ago. Seems like the late fifties are the magical years when every user’s doctor sits him down.

Actors are telling our kids they can have superhuman physiques by eating chicken and exercising a lot. Then kids find out it’s not true, and while they’re at the gym, they start talking to other kids who look like Ronnie Coleman, and then they start taking drugs.

Entertainment promotes torture. It really does. Goody-goody Tom Hanks tortured a suspect in a lame cop movie. Arnold Schwarzenegger tortured people. Kiefer Sutherland. Josh Brolin. Benicio del Toro. Kathleen Turner. Tommy Lee Jones. Lots of movies and shows feature torture scenes, and we’re supposed to feel good about it because it’s the good guys doing the torturing. The movies make torture, which should turn our stomachs and give us nightmares, satisfying. Just like Stanley Kubrick made rape seem funny and sexy.

Liberal actors are the best gun salesmen there are, after Barack Obama. We watch movies and then go to gun stores and buy the guns the actors held. We even buy stupid guns like the obsolete rifle Tom Selleck used in Quigley Down Under, a movie which sounds like it was named after a disease.

We decorate our guns with a skull logo that was used in Punisher movies. We buy “tactical” clothes actors wear, and we wear them to gun ranges.

You can buy a bobbed lever-action rifle like the one John Wayne used. Wayne was a draft-dodger real soldiers booed during World War II, and he never saved a town from a brutal rancher, but we still like that Italian-made tribute rifle.

It’s a third-rate weapon. Low capacity, low velocity, relatively inaccurate, and slow to cycle. Doesn’t matter.

Sensible gun owners use guns to hunt and to defend life. They teach others to be responsible and humane. Gun owners under the influence of Hollywood are participating in a dangerous form of demon cosplay. They secretly hope for a chance to put their toys and skills to the test on human beings.

Name something bad. Entertainment promotes it successfully. Witchcraft. Socialism. Feminism. Stealing. The murder of the unborn.

PG-rated entertainment and even news sites are gateways to porn compulsions. I could go on about other things entertainment leads to, and I have, in other posts.

Holiness also means dropping people who pull you away from God.

The word says we should not be unequally yoked. People think this is just about marriage. It’s not. It’s about everything. Friendship. Business. Everything.

A friend of mine started a business with some nominal Christians who were, frankly, creeps. I knew it was a bad idea. He thought it would make him rich. He made excuses for them. He gave the business a name that made it sound like it had something to do with God.

His partners undermined him. They let employees walk on him. They overruled his good ideas. They pretty much killed the business. They finally drove him out. He had wasted years of his life.

Now he’s trying his hand at construction, which is something he knew nothing about three years ago. He had a nominal-Christian buddy who was going to teach him everything.

The buddy connected him with irresponsible trash typical of the subcontractor breed. He let him get into pickles that caused great expense and delay. A house that was supposed to be built in a few months is now in its third year, and it’s a mess. I don’t think anyone will buy it unless they want to raze it and use the lot. He should have built and sold several houses by now. He hasn’t seen a dollar in profit.

Say you take three years to build a house, you spend $100,000, and your profit is $150,000. Sounds like you won, but you were supposed to build 5 houses during that time and make $1,000,000 in profit.

When I worked with unbelievers and nominal Christians, they sabotaged and blackballed me right and left. My dad’s partner cheated me. His other partner got us to buy a new building and then got suspended for doing drugs and sleeping with strippers. My first boss in the field of law tried to cheat me and then broke his promise to give me a permanent job. A friend he recommended me to cheated me. When I was a writer, editors gave other people things they promised me. My own family cheats me on my inheritance.

I even got demoted while working in a bar, so a thief could take my place.

When you work with dark-siders, they abuse you, and they also pressure you to do things the devil’s way. You shouldn’t get involved with them in the first place.

If you’re letting demons in with things that seem innocent, it will lead to bondages that clearly are not innocent. Netflix will lead to porn and fornication. News sites can lead to rage. Satan’s kingdom is like a nail. If you let the small, sharp end in, the big fat end will follow.

Demons don’t just do one thing. A spirit that causes anger may also cause health problems. A spirit of pornography may curse your finances. Procrastination can cause high blood pressure because of stress. You won’t necessarily know which ungodly behaviors cause which problems.

Demons are like squatters. Have you noticed how squatters behave? They’re under the influence of demons. They don’t just occupy homes. They tear them up, for no reason. They rip out walls and break windows, even though they live in the houses. To a demon, your body is a house that belongs to someone else.

If you give up evil people and secular entertainment (including sports), and you minimize your exposure to the news, you and your family will be safe. Fewer demons will be able to get at you. Your exposure to troublesome people will be diminished. God will be closer to you. Things will get better, even as they get worse for others.

This is what holiness really means.

This should be obvious, but preachers don’t teach it. Most of them just want your money or a nice secure job. They don’t receive revelation. No one taught them, either. I had to learn these things directly from God because preachers were nothing but parasites to me.

My involvement with preachers was unequal yoking. Think about that. The thing that was supposed to help me.

No wonder God hates bad preachers so much.

My son will hear good things from me. I will introduce him to the Holy Spirit, and after that, if my son chooses, the Holy Spirit will finish teaching him and correct mistakes I’ve made.

This will be helpful to you if you give it a try. I’ve put it out there. I can’t do much more.

Is That a City Burning Over There on the Horizon?

I got nothing done today, and I’m loving it. Instead of painting the kitchen or putting a new oil seal in the tractor’s front axle, I put the family in the car, and we went for lunch and supplies.

The weather is bearable now. The heat has abated, and the rains have tapered off. It’s beautiful here. Even better, we have a new Captain D’s and a Restaurant Depot.

Captain D’s is basically the same as Long John Silver’s. Fish fried in near-tempura batter, served with fries. In other words, fish and chips.

The only local LJ’s is a long way off, and it seems to be making long, slow circles around the drain, so I was very happy when Captain D’s came to town.

Restaurant Depot is a food service company. A grocery store for restaurants. They sell big packages of restaurant-grade food at wholesale prices.

Restaurant Depot is a godsend if you want to make real pizza. They have every flour known to humanity, they carry Stanislaus and Escalon tomato products, and they sell decent mozzarella, which is more than you can say for nearly all grocery stores.

You’re not supposed to shop at Restaurant Depot unless you run a business, but they will let you in for a day if you’re a mere mortal. You won’t have access to alcohol, and there are other perks you won’t get, but you can buy most products at the same prices chefs pay.

Yesterday I found out anyone with a federal EIN could get a Restaurant Depot card, so I decided I needed to become a member. I took care of that today. I feel superior to other people now.

Captain D’s was shocking. Most restaurants here are dirty, and the employees tend to be incompetent. Captain D’s was spotless. The staff was well-groomed, courteous, and efficient. The food was exactly what it was supposed to be. No excuses. The tartar sauce and ketchup were a little subpar, but you’re supposed to use malt vinegar at Captain D’s.

I guess some people would make fun of me for getting excited about fast food, but then the world is full of idiots. A really good burger with fries is just as good as the black cod at Nobu or the pate at Picasso. It’s just a different cuisine.

Any restaurant that does a top-notch job providing tasty food is a good restaurant, and a really good Five Guys is better than a mediocre haute cuisine joint.

I like restaurateurs that do a great job, whether they serve wagyu or food-truck tacos.

Captain D’s is the Chick-fil-A of fish and chips.

Yesterday I ate at a restaurant that put canned green peppers and canned onions on a pizza, so I was ready for some redemption.

I love Restaurant Depot. They really cut through the grocery-store BS.

Huge bag of shelled pistachios: $8. Gallon can of pomace oil: $17. Good mozzarella: $2 per pound.

Best of all for today: 50 pounds of beef tallow for $68. This is about what 40 pounds of peanut oil cost at the grocery, and peanut oil is vastly inferior.

Beef tallow makes crisper fries that taste much better, and that’s why McDonald’s used to use it. It’s perfect for frying chicken, which is why KFC used it for decades before women and vegetarians made them cave in and use rape oil.

I looked at tallow last year, and I saw prices like $150. I was going to spring for it eventually. I like $68 much better, and at Restaurant Depot, I get an extra 10 pounds for the kitchen or my wife’s skin care. Or my baby’s butt.

This is great.

It seems unfair for life to be this sweet while everyone else is gearing up for an unnecessary civil war.

How Can This be a Good Deal for God?

I had a disturbing revelation during the night.

I often wake up at night and spend hours praying. I can’t get back to sleep. God confronts me with things about myself that need to be corrected. Sometimes it’s very unpleasant, but I look forward to it, because I want to be right. That’s just common sense. No one wants to continue being wrong and causing problems for himself and others.

Well. Many people do, actually. Most, I suppose.

Last night, I thought about the blood of Yeshua.

I have the cutest baby son you could ever hope to meet. He is funny. He adores his parents. He loves being hugged and played with. He puts his lips on us and makes hilarious noises. He tries to be a good boy; we can tell by watching him.

A large amount of our time is devoted to showing him love. He gets squeezed and kissed all day. I don’t know how we could love him more. The thought of anything bad happening to him is unbearable to me.

Abraham loved his son, too, and like me, he waited a long time for him. His rebellious wife was disobedient to God and persuaded him to have a troublesome son by a concubine, but the son of promise came later.

God told him to hold his beautiful, cherished son down, slit his throat, and watch him die. Abraham tried to do it, although his heart must have been bursting inside him.

Yahweh went farther than Abraham.

He had one son. Only one. He was perfect. He was full of love. He adored his father. He loved his earthly father. He was completely innocent, even in his thirties. Then God had him tortured to death, slowly, so his blood could be used to wash his enemies.

God loved his enemies–us–so much, he put himself and his son through that.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t cut the tip of my son’s finger. I would much rather cut myself. If he were killed, and someone collected his blood, I wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of it. I would want to die.

Here I am, however, continually claiming to be washed in the blood of God’s son, whom God loves more than I love mine.

That is really something. It shows what a serious thing it is when we claim the blood. It also shows how precious it is. We should never speak about it carelessly. It’s a person’s blood, taken by violence for which we are responsible, provided to us by that person’s adoring father.

I kept hearing a phrase during the night: “I am expensive.”

That is putting it very mildly. Imagine how expensive I am, if God traded the life, flesh, and blood of his only son so he could have me. It’s incomprehensible.

God calls his human children a pearl of great price, worth everything he has. He is serious. He paid all he had.

You can be expensive, too, if you want.

In other news, I am done with The Last Reformation. It seems to have deteriorated consistently over the last few years. It’s all Torben this and TLR doctrine that. It’s not what it used to be.

If you look at TLR’s video history, you will see that they used to heal and baptize people. Now, the focus has shifted. “Go on trips with us.” Explanations of doctrine that may be flawed. Complaints about Torben’s enemies and his imprisonment and deportation.

Here’s something important to know: anyone who lacks current testimony and revelation is having problems in his relationship with God. God never stops teaching us and doing remarkable things in our lives.

A lack of testimony is one of the hallmarks of a dead ministry. When you go to a typical church, the preacher gives testimony, but it’s not his. It may be the testimony of people he read about recently. It may be made-up testimony other preachers have been passing around, not knowing it’s fiction. In what may be the worst cases, it may be the testimony of people who lived 2,000 years ago.

Properly, “testimony” means “eyewitness testimony.” If you share your buddy’s testimony, it’s hearsay. It wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law. You’re not a witness. You’re just someone who heard a story.

TLR’s videos used to be full of evidence of the activity of God. Healing and deliverance, mainly. This isn’t true any more. It’s mostly talk, advertising, and teaching of questionable value.

I’ve been to TLR events in St. Petersburg, Raleigh, and Tennessee. I didn’t drive long distances so I could see Torben Sondergaard or learn how to use TLR’s special salvation cards. I didn’t make those trips so I could join their school and live in a dormitory with strangers, as though I were a child in boarding school. I wanted to get closer to God and have him move through me, and I thought they could help.

I met some nice people through TLR, but they were not insiders. I did not see any extraordinary healings. I participated in one deliverance. I had some useful experiences. But the ministry got stuck in a rut, and it is still there.

This is typical of my experience. I find a ministry I like. I involve myself to some extent. I get some good things out of it. I notice that the people who are heavily involved seem to be less blessed than I am, and that they are bogged down in their walks. No one listens when I try to help. I am seen as a problem. The ministry deteriorates. I let it go and move on.

This must be why God doesn’t send me to church. Churches are invariably run by preachers who know less about God than I do and who expect me to regress back to their levels. They can’t tolerate any revelation that didn’t come through them or their revered mentors and forebears. Revelation can’t come through nobodies like me; it has to come through people they know or who were powerful in their denominations. My job is to shut up and accept false correction, and I’m supposed to repent and apologize for actual revelation. Who am I to contradict a guy who has a jet, or even a guy who hangs around with a more successful guy who has a jet?

I’ll say it again: if God speaks to everyone in a church, which is what’s supposed to happen, Satan can’t do much to ruin things. He is weak and limited, so he can’t go after hundreds of Spirit-informed people simultaneously with any chance of success. In a personality cult, which means nearly any church, all he has to do is corrupt the pastor, and then the pastor corrupts everyone else, which is easy, because he hasn’t introduced them to the Holy Spirit. Instead, he introduced them to himself; an ambitious guy who likes telling others what to do.

Who did Satan use most effectively to keep ancient Jews from recognizing Yeshua and becoming blessed and saved? Whores and pagans? No! Priests and scribes. Satan won them over, and they corrupted Jews who thought they spoke for God, and that was the majority.

“I’ve been on 10 trips with Daniel Kolenda.” “I carried Kenneth Hagin’s briefcase.” People attach themselves to preachers and brag about how close they are or were. Many Christians feel that if they know famous preachers personally, they are somehow endowed with the authority and righteousness of Yeshua, even if they have never met him.

Satan wants us to worship preachers because it makes his operation work much more efficiently. He has used preacher-worship in his successful campaign to cripple the body of Christ.

Satan can’t corrupt the Holy Spirit, so if you spend sufficient time with the Holy Spirit every day, Satan can’t destroy you the way he has destroyed most self-described Christians.

I have probably spent a grand total of 45 seconds speaking to Torben Sondergaard at his events. I never had any interest in chasing him around to get his approval. I want people to bring me closer to God, not the other way around. Also, I don’t want to be a typical Jesus-buff pastor-pest. I don’t want to be the guy who stomps past people who are in need of help so I can tell the pastor how wonderful he is and get his approval.

A long time ago, I thought Robert Morris knew a few things, so we had a brief email correspondence. I wanted to learn more. I ended up asking him about a claim he had made that appeared to be wrong, and that was the last I heard from him. Now look what has happened to him. Where would I be if I had made him my guru?

He truly was wrong, by the way, and he should have known it. I think I still have his DVD’s, which I should really throw out.

I must have stirred up his pride, and proud preachers are to be avoided.

I liked Perry Stone because God showed him a lot of things. I never thought he was the new messiah, however. He ended up causing a sex scandal which, due to his dishonest denials and slanderous accusations, damaged his credibility forever.

I never spent significant time carrying anyone’s briefcase, doing his laundry, or helping set up his tent in Africa. I want to hear from God, not preachers.

I like T.B. Joshua, who died in 2021. I like Mark Hemans. I find the BBC’s accusations regarding Joshua to be transparent, debunked, intentional slanders. I haven’t heard anything bad about Hemans. Nonetheless, I don’t assume everything they said or say is correct.

The only problem I have with Joshua is that he had long conversations with people he was delivering. He asked demons all sorts of questions. “What did you do to this woman?” “Why did you do it?” Why would anyone give a platform to a demon? They lie. A demon might be lucky to lie to a thousand people through a person he controls, but put him in front of a popular minister whose videos go all over the world, and he can reach millions.

I believe Hemans gets a little chatty, too.

Here’s a wild proposition: we’re not supposed to let demons teach. Prove me wrong.

On a related note, the rapture has not come, unless I’m such a bad Christian I was rejected.

I saw a lady in a video, claiming her autistic son told her it would happen in September of 2025. She says he told her several true things no human being could know. Christians, who rarely investigate anything, got excited.

It’s the first of October.

Autism is often or perhaps always caused by demons, so this lady was getting supernatural information from a person who was in the grip of evil spirits. And she believed him, and other Christians believed her. That’s weird.

He communicates using a letter board, which is basically a secular Ouija board. It’s supposed to be a spiritually-neutral tool, but there is no reason a demon can’t use it just like a Ouija board.

She may have been making the whole thing up, though. People are contemptible and capable of anything, or, as my mom used to say, “People are no damn good.”

I am going to try to take the blood of Yeshua much more seriously. I already knew what God told me about it, but a revelation from God is somehow much more deeply convincing than common sense or a verse in the Bible.

I hear the baby making flatulence noises and squeaks of joy. I better go love him for a minute.

If You Find This Post Distressing, Blame the Jews

If the rapture doesn’t come soon, I don’t know how Christians will be able to stand living in this world.

Conservatives and Christians are now spewing lies about the Charlie Kirk assassination. Nominal Christians, anyway. No one who listens to the Holy Spirit is fooled by kooky conspiracy theories.

The thing about this that irks me the most is seeing people praise the liars while claiming God’s authority. God didn’t tell you to agree with demonized nuts who say Israel, the FBI, Charlie Kirk’s bodyguards, or anyone other than a Mormon homosexual named Tyler Robinson shot Charlie Kirk.

The chaos is amazing. How are you going to know who to point your AR-15 with Punisher skulls on the magazine at if you can’t even agree on a scapegoat? Are you going to shoot Netanyahu? Are you going to shoot Kash Patel? Figure it out. You’re bringing shame on nutcases everywhere.

I just saw a video by a conservative gun enthusiast. The kind of person who, one would guess, thinks he and his militia buddies are going to fix America for Christ. He and his followers are suggesting the assassination was an inside job because–get this–it looks like some of the bodyguards were wearing AI glasses.

Well. If that’s not proof, I don’t know what is.

They’re saying the people around Kirk were laughing after he got shot. One says Kirk was waving his arm, trying to run things. Another says nobody put pressure on the wound.

Charlie Kirk was shot with a .30-06. The cowardly liberal pervert who shot him used a rifle his grandfather used on deer. The .30-06 is a very powerful round. It’s supposed to blow flesh apart permanently on its way through bodies, causing so much blood loss or other damage the victim is incapacitated as soon as possible.

A hunting round from a .30-06 doesn’t just pass through flesh, leaving a long, thin hole. It tears things up. Hunting rounds are made to expand and/or break up. They’re made to be destructive.

Kirk was shot in the neck, which contains things like the spinal column, spinal cord, jugular veins, trachea, and carotid arteries. These are things we need in order to remain alive and conscious. When the bullet hit him, the flesh around it blew outward around the axis of travel, ripping things up and sending hydrostatic shock into every part of his neck.

He was almost certainly dead as soon as he was struck. They rushed him to a hospital because that’s what you do when someone is shot. They didn’t think he was going to make it. He wasn’t conscious and giving them guidance.

If they didn’t put pressure on the wound, which probably is not true, it would likely indicate they could see he was dead. I’ve seen the footage that supposedly proves there was no pressure, and it is completely impossible to tell whether pressure was applied.

I can’t figure out why anyone would think AI glasses were somehow evidence that Kirk’s team wanted him dead. I’m also amazed that anyone over the age of three seriously thinks these people would have him shot from over a hundred yards, with a cheap surplus rifle with a badly-mounted scope.

The shooter nearly missed. He wasn’t shooting for the side of Kirk’s neck. He was shooting at the center of his chest. No serious assassin takes a risky shot when he can take an easier one. Lying in a prone position, which is the best way to shoot, with plenty of time, Tyler Robinson hit Kirk about 10″ from his most likely point of aim.

The gun used was a poverty gun. Military surplus, made by unmotivated Russian Communists. The scope was mounted badly. It belonged to the killer’s grandfather, who probably paid under a hundred dollars for it before adding a scope and synthetic stock. It was probably something like a 7-MOA gun, meaning it could be counted on to shoot groups about 7″ wide at 100 yards, so more like 10″ at the range at which Kirk was shot. It was not a skilled assassin’s weapon of choice. A $500 AR-15 would have been a lot better.

Check out the deranged comments.

They wanted Charlie dead. He was reaching the youth. He changed people’s hearts and minds. He was a threat to the shadow government!

At this point it is completely obvious that this wasn’t just an assassination, but a professional hit job.

This whole situation smells like a CIA hit. I think the kid who supposedly shot Charlie was a scape goat.

I think he is still alive. It was a setup. Nothing is adding up.

Clear as day they weren’t helping Charlie; but they were tampering with evidence!

The fact that a head of a certain country made 2 videos, within 72 hours, denouncing any knowledge or responsibility in the situation is pretty much the biggest red flag ever!

The guys are smiling because they are activating a secret trapdoor that was under his chair. That blood looked like it was a movie prop burst. I have had a suspicion that he’s alive and that was a dummy that was switched when the security is over him. They handed off a key to that door. Why else are they pouring concrete all around the spot? Israel wanted him dead and so he had to die before they actually killed him.

I rebuke these lies and bind these people to come out with the whole truth.

This assassination is one of the clearest-cut cases of leftist-pervert gun-barrel activism in history. The killer confessed to more than one person. He confessed in writing. His own parents turned him in. He was captured by multiple security cameras. We have the gun. We have the bullet. His dress-wearing XY girlfriend is cooperating with the police.

Even if he had walked up to Kirk in front of the crowd and killed him with a hatchet to the forehead, the demon whisperers would still be spouting their theories.

I want OUT of this place. It was bad enough when everyone on the left was insane. Now the friendlies are wigging out, and they can’t even form a consensus, so I assume they’ll be turning on each other as well as the innocent.

My own relatives have gone nuts.

I remember realizing how unhinged my aunt had become. I was in Singapore at the airport, after a fantastic vacation with my wife, waiting for a flight home. It was after midnight. My aunt called to talk about a property we own in common. I told her it wasn’t a good time because of the circumstances.

She went off on me, demanding to know who goes on vacation in November. She was furious. I couldn’t believe it.

Called me another time about family business, and I told her she needed to start selling things instead of trying to maintain a decaying real estate memorial to my long-forgotten grandparents. She had no idea I was married. Started telling me she had more stuff than I did, as though that excused incompetence. She said I had nothing but “maybe a sorry dog.”

She has apparently forgotten losing her composure and saying nutty, hostile things to me, because the other day, she sent me a text asking if I thought democracy was going to survive. As though we were on cordial terms. I politely declined to discuss it.

I don’t want her in my life as social or even business contact. She is too far gone. I don’t hold onto abusers any more. Blood isn’t really thicker than water. I dream of the day when the last bit of real estate will be sold.

Now she goes on Facebook and posts wacky memes comparing Trump to Hitler and so on.

Hitler sent special trucks around to force Jews to breathe carbon monoxide. He invaded neighboring countries and stole their treasures. He had doctors investigate the cheapest ways to castrate Jewish men and men with mental issues.

Trump is a little different. He’s working to get rid of illegal aliens, bring peace to the world, restore free speech, and make federal laws and regulations sensible. The Hitler analogy is just a bit over the top, except to crazy people who listen to demons all day.

We used to have a great relationship. We laughed and talked together. She was a junior high principal, entrusted with looking after people’s children. Then the apocalypse virus destroyed her sanity.

I have a second cousin about my aunt’s age. Nicest lady you would ever want to meet. At least in the past. Now she’s right in there with my aunt. Check out this masterpiece of delusion she posted on Facebook.

My mother loved her. My other aunts loved her. What happened to her personality? Wait. I know. The Israelis stole her brain and replaced it.

I’ve had it. I want the rapture to come before it gets worse. Maybe you know what I always say: if it’s this crazy now, what will it be like in 6 months?

Last night my wife and I were talking in our big, comfortable bed. Our beautiful, charming, intelligent baby son was lying between us. I started talking about our lives. I started asking if she could even understand how blessed we were. It is something that continually amazes me. God has been so good to us, and I am not good.

We marveled at our situation. Paired up by the Holy Spirit. In strong agreement about nearly everything. Set aside in a peaceful area dominated by conservative Christians who are patient, kind, and full of love, unlike people in Miami or the white ghetto known as Eastern Kentucky. Healthy. Blissfully unemployed. Close to God. Constantly receiving astonishing, helpful Holy Spirit revelation.

On the other hand, all over America, people are going so crazy it’s a wonder they don’t need diapers and spit masks. They are furious at each other over nothing. Leftists are so mad they are quite willing to murder us and our children in the streets, and some conservatives are no better. People live with overwhelming anger and worry, but we are insulated in our cozy little cocoon.

It’s like we’re riding a monorail through Jurassic Park at feeding time!

I don’t know how I would live if I had to be on a quarter of an acre in a blue suburb, or if I were a Jew. Jews need to wake up and move to Israel or far-right counties before it’s too late. Jew-hatred is now treated like a legitimate, acceptable political point of view. It has been mainstreamed.

Candace Owens is getting rich from Youtube, Twitter, and Instagram checks. Youtube and Instagram are run by liberals, and the guy who started Facebook, which owns Instagram, is a Jew! How weird is that?

Anyway, Charlie Kirk was murdered by a lone sodomite, so try not to get worked up by conspiracy theorists.

Until Judgment Day Sorts Out the Weeds

Yesterday was our day of rest. I shudder a little when I hear a Christian call Sunday the sabbath, because “shabbat,” or “sabbath,” is literally the name of Saturday in Hebrew, but anyway, we now rest on Sundays, and we make more effort than usual to be with God.

God told me all my problems, not some, are caused by lack of prayer, so a day dedicated to him will surely improve my life.

God never commanded Gentiles to observe the real sabbath, but the sabbath principle is a helpful one just the same.

A rest day brings people close to God in more than one way. It helps us to sit down and read scripture. It helps us to pray. It helps us to pursue these things as families, building marriages and relationships. Perhaps most importantly, though, it reinforces humility. That’s important because pride is the absolute worst thing a person can have. It’s better to be a humble pedophile who can listen and change than a proud evangelist who isn’t saved and can’t be corrected.

Saturday doesn’t work as well for us. Stores are open later than they are on Sunday, and stores that close on Sunday are open. The Post Office is open. Chick-fil-A is open. There are things a resident of my county can get done on Saturday that are harder to do on Sundays. Also, if God ever tells us to go to church, which he has not, we can add it to our day of rest without shaking anything up.

I have been told that Christians honor God on Sundays because it worked well for the early church. Virtually all believers were Jewish in the beginning, and as Gentiles were brought in, somehow it made more sense to let Jews do their purely-Jewish activities on their sabbath and then come together with them on the first day of the week.

True? I don’t know. Dishonest Christians have made up so many lies, how would I find out? Bad Christians made up the saints and baby baptism. They made up the prosperity gospel. Horrible Christians like Augustine propagated the ethos of polytheistic Greek sodomites in the church. Bad Christians made up all the odd things the Seventh-Day Adventists believe.

For all I know, Joseph Smith thought he was a Christian when he made up Mormonism and claimed an Egyptian writing about preparing the dead for burial was really a biography of Abraham.

When you quit trying to solve your own problems for a day, you are telling God you believe he will work on them for you while you rest, and you are admitting you believe he can do it better than you can. That’s faith plus humility.

At some point during our rest time, we saw a Christian on Youtube, talking about the demonstrable insanity or dishonesty of Candace Owens, who is now calling Israel a “demonic nation” and trying to convince people Israel, not the homosexual activist Tyler Robinson, murdered Charlie Kirk.

After all, Israel has a policy of murdering its American critics, and it makes sense that it started with Charlie Kirk, not Owens, Tucker Carlson, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Al Sharpton, Kanye West, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Louis Farrakhan.

Owens insists that Robinson, a sexual aberrant Mormon who was in love with a homosexual male crossdresser with whom he shared quarters, is not the actual murderer, and she is suggesting he will be murdered in custody in order to protect the guilty party, who is presumably a mohel or an executive at Manischewitz (perhaps both).

Robinson confessed to his parents and his sex partner, and he did it in writing, not just orally. Owens disagrees, based on what she is hearing from whatever demons she listens to all day in the pursuit of wealth.

Robinson told his father he would rather kill himself than turn himself in. Owens, however, says she knows better. She says he is not suicidal, so if he dies in custody, it will be the work of the same Mossad agent who got Jeffrey Epstein, Nicole Brown Simpson, John Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln.

As we watched the speaker talk, I was impressed by his intelligence and his understanding of Candace Owens. Then he started claiming Charlie Kirk was an evangelist. Right there, I realized he was caught up in a mass delusion of his own.

It is nothing short of amazing that anyone would call Charlie Kirk an evangelist. He was a politician who debated college kids. He occasionally said good things about Yeshua and Christianity; the same could be said of Mike Lindell and most gangster rappers.

He didn’t teach about God. He didn’t receive or relay revelation from the Holy Spirit, which is something every single Christian is supposed to do. He didn’t cast out demons. He didn’t heal anyone. He didn’t have visions. He didn’t have the supernatural testimony common to men of God. He didn’t create a ministry. He created two political organizations that made him very good money and positioned him to run for lucrative political offices later.

Politics was the spare ribs. Christianity was the coleslaw. It’s obvious. It’s not subject to reasonable dispute.

Even Torben Sondergaard, who does cast out demons and heal people, claims Kirk was a some kind of minister. That is disappointing. It’s also disappointing that his ministry, The Last Reformation, got rid of a comment I posted, disagreeing with Torben.

Torben was censored. He was driven out of Denmark and the USA, and he was imprisoned for a very long time. He should be sensitive about censoring others.

The Last Reformation lost its shine for me a while back. It seemed to be turning into a denomination and focusing way too much on Torben. Also, his right-hand man, a Dane named Jón Bjarnastein, was getting pretty uppity.

When I went to be rebaptized by TLR, Jan talked to me as though I were a child who had never opened a Bible. I’m old enough to be his father.

He has serious pride issues. When I took my friend Mike to an event to be baptized, he refused to let TLR do it. He refused because Jón mocked prayer in tongues while he was speaking to the crowd. He made nonsense noises in an effort to be funny.

I guess every Christian will commit blasphemy a few times before he dies, and it’s usually unintentional, but what Jón did was pretty disturbing, and a man in his position should know better. Mike flat-out said he would not let TLR put him under. We went back to my hotel, and I baptized him.

For a long time, I’ve had the feeling Torben was giving himself to ambition, and when a man who leads an organization becomes ambitious, carnal people will attach themselves to him to “help” him.

This is how Torben got in trouble in Denmark. A TV network offered to film him, and he thought it would help his ministry. He entered into an unequal yoking, they stabbed him in the back, and he and his ministry were slandered so powerfully the public rose up against him in outrage.

Never listen when someone who doesn’t believe in Yeshua says he’s here to help your ministry.

I went to another event by myself, and another young associate talked to me as though I were stupid. For example, out of nowhere, he told me I didn’t have to have Torben himself pray for me, as though I had shown up and refused to talk to anyone else. I have spoken to Torben briefly, but I never chased him around or felt I needed to interact with him personally. I never even sought to be near him in a group. I was there to be with God, not Torben Sondergaard. I didn’t ask him to sign my Bible. I didn’t buy a bobblehead.

I felt unwelcome. Like an outsider.

I always try to be humble when I talk to people in ministry, as long as they’re serious people who seem to be on the right track, but I am used to them responding to humility the same way worldly people with a little authority do. I am used to impatience, condescension, and imperiousness. I am used to resentment and flashes of irritation and even anger. It’s funny how these things are seen as normal among ministers.

Give someone his own desk, a yellow vest, or a name tag, and chances are, he will immediately become the supreme authority of Earth.

This may sound awful, but I don’t care, so here goes. I was disturbed to find out Torben’s wife had a nervous breakdown, went to doctors, and was put on drugs while he was in prison.

“You’re criticizing a woman who was upset because her husband was in prison!” No, my fine troll; of course I’m not. I’m surprised that a Spirit-filled Christian with a powerful ministry could have severe mental issues that had to be addressed with drugs. I’m also surprised that it was concealed for so long.

For me, one of the biggest benefits of spending time with the Holy Spirit is good mental health. I don’t always receive healing for my physical issues, but I can’t say that about things like depression, anxiety, and so on. Those things are defeated, and they have been for a long time. I just assume that anyone who spends a lot of time with God will be protected from them.

I can be depressed for maybe three days. That’s it. And it has to be related to something bad that has just happened. Chronic depression, which is a real mental problem, not an acute response to misfortune, is different. It makes you feel bad for no good reason, and it doesn’t go away.

I always say I was depressed continually for the first three decades of my life. I guess I was actually 35 when it ended, so three and a half years. It hasn’t come back. It’s a major change. The most remarkable and lasting personality change I have ever experienced.

I just assume that people who are with God a lot of the day are not depressed or insane. I don’t see how depression or insanity could happen to them. I don’t think I’m wrong. God promises us peace.

I believe that if your prayer life is strong and you are fighting demons and repenting, your mind will be sound. I haven’t been proven wrong yet.

I don’t think becoming a cessationist Baptist will fix your problems. Christianity is supernatural. It’s not a system of rules. It’s a relationship with a supernatural person. But surely the Holy Spirit helps those who spend time with him.

She had to be treated with dangerous drugs, and as far as I know, the problem was concealed at first. I’m on their email list, and I didn’t hear about it until it had already happened. At least I don’t think so. I can go back and check, but I don’t think I ever received an email that said, “Lene is experiencing mental torment. Pray God delivers her so we don’t have to involve secular doctors.”

When I was being treated for ADD, they gave me depression drugs because they were believed to be effective for ADD as well. I wouldn’t wish them on Hamas. They actually made me depressed. They also made it impossible for me to eat, sleep, relax, or concentrate.

The worst drug was Prozac. Somehow, my doctor got it into her head that it could help. I took it very briefly. I had all the symptoms I mentioned above, and it made my private parts numb. I’m sure you wanted to know about that.

When I quit taking it, the effects took about two months to wear off. Unbelievable. No wonder people who are being treated for depression commit suicide or shoot into crowds.

I never felt like harming anyone, including myself, thank God. Please don’t send the padded bus for me. I have never, ever felt suicidal in my life. Murdering people has never crossed my mind. It’s foreign to me, like wanting to eat liver or listen to Alanis Morrissette. Not my thing.

They did give me one drug that made me confrontational and obnoxious. I found it useful when I needed to be confrontational, but it didn’t help with ADD. It was a bad experience.

Psychiatric drugs have a scary history. They should be tools of last resort. Even caffeine is bad.

If a minister has mental problems, hiding it is the worst possible thing to do. When it finally comes out a) it will make people question God, and b) it will make people doubt the ministry, correctly. They will wonder what else is being hidden from them.

It will also prevent people from praying for the afflicted minister, and it will prevent them from offering advice and correction that could save the day.

You don’t become incapacitated by depression because you’re doing everything perfectly. I believe every mental problem has a solution in God. Who would argue with that? If God isn’t willing to fix every mental problem, why do you think so highly of him and boast that he works miracles?

I suspect they kept the news quiet because it would have made TLR look ineffective. Surely it couldn’t have been to save her embarrassment. There was nothing to be embarrassed about. I think most Christians are eager to admit it when they are down and need prayer.

It did make TLR look ineffective, though, and keeping it quiet made TLR look dishonest.

Now I can expect trolls to pop up and accuse me of picking on a sick woman. Trolls gonna troll. Keep your gaslighting. It just encourages me. Satan is the slanderer, and his nominal-Christian children never miss a chance to be like dad.

I enjoyed dealing with TLR, and they did a lot of good, but I don’t think TLR is the final answer or the last reformation. For one thing, they taught that we should baptize in the name of Yeshua only, which is odd. The Bible doesn’t say that.

Matthew 28:19: Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

How can anyone miss something that obvious?

To get back to troll-harvesting, I want to write about a conversation my wife and I had. We discussed the numbers obsession many Christians have. Anyone who “saves” 80,000 people at an event is a great man of God, say the quantity-pushers. Anyone who criticizes such people is self-righteous. They’re wrong.

A lot of the quantity gospel depends on the myth of eternal security, which says that if you go to one altar call, you are saved for eternity regardless of what you do later. It’s like you’re a calf, and when you go stand in front of Eddie Long or Jimmy Swaggart for a couple of minutes, Yeshua puts a tag in your ear, and after that, nothing can separate you.

It’s not just a lie; it’s a blatant lie.

Eternal security people love to quote the scripture where Yeshua said no one could take his sheep out of his hand. The problem is that he never said we could not leave of our own free will. We can.

You can raise your hand and cry, leave church, get back in your car, go home, smoke two blunts, and have a threesome with your girlfriend and her sister. You can continue your work as a pimp. You can continue robbing houses. You can even keep your voodoo paraphernalia and continue sacrificing chickens and declaring your love for Bondye or whatever other evil spirit you like.

Do you seriously think you can’t go to hell if you do things like that? Seriously? Really?

Many, many Christians live this way. It’s SOP for American charismatics. My last two churches used to put pregnant trollops on the stage to sing. Trinity Church in Miami had a known car thief on the music team, and he drowned running from the police in handcuffs.

Did he repent and receive new salvation while he was drowning in a canal on Miami Beach? Well, one would like to think so. But based on what his pastors taught him (if he believed at all), he probably thought he would wake up in heaven regardless.

You don’t have eternal security unless you keep living right. I don’t mean obeying rules perfectly, but you have to be with God a lot and have a holy lifestyle, separated from the world.

Salvation is not an event. It’s a way of life.

Because ignorant big-tent Christians love numbers, they love anyone who draws them.

These are the same people who say Mormons are cool because they say Yeshua is their savior. They’re not cool. They’re not Christians. They’re heretics.

I used to work as a volunteer for Pastor Rich Wilkerson, Sr. In around 2012, he came up with a numbers game for us. He called it “the 2020 Vision.” We were given salvation cards. Every time we saw a person get “saved,” we were supposed to fill out a card. Name and date and so on.

The goal was to get a certain number of “souls” by 2020. I think the real goal was to build a huge mailing list without paying an outside company.

Of course, like all Wilkerson projects, the 2020 Vision was plagiarized and came to nothing. He did’t tell us, but I Googled, and the web was full of “2020 Vision” crusades from other preachers, going back years.

One of the big problems with the 2020 Vision is that even if we had seriously tried to “save” people, there was no mechanism for guiding them afterward. Go home, have sex with every girl in the hood, keep trying to become a famous gangster rapper, steal cars…it’s okay, as long as Rich has your card.

I can’t even guess how many present and former Trinity members are on the way to hell, confident that one altar call justified every rotten thing they would ever do.

I mention the 2020 Vision farce in order to show the problem with the numbers people. They prefer hundreds of thousands of fake salvations to a few real salvations.

As my wife and I discussed this, we talked about Yeshua and how different his policy was.

He never talked to a really big crowd. He got 3,000 once, if I recall. Most people he talked to abandoned him. He said things that were very harsh, all the time. He said things he knew would offend people and reduce his stats. He ended up with 11 close followers and a total of 120 in the Upper Room, after around three years of work and thousands of miracles.

He never watered down his message in hopes he would be popular, even though he knew that people who rejected him would burn forever.

My wife and I talked about the way we got together.

Someone I knew had all sorts of online women from dating sites. He kept telling me I should try it. I was okay with dying single, but I tried it anyway. Within about 4 months, I was engaged, and I was married within about 7. My wife and I get along beautifully. We have never had a serious marital problem. We agree and agree and agree. My friend is still single, 4 years later, and he started looking for a wife long before I did.

When I wrote my dating profiles, I used the Yeshua approach, not the quantity-is-king approach. I was not inclusive. I worked hard to drive women off.

I told them what my beliefs were. I told them not to even waste my time if we were not on the same page. I was brutal.

My wife saw it, liked it, and here we are.

I did what Yeshua does. I focused more on running off people who had no chance than on attracting people. I ran off leftists. I ran off cessationists.

I was building a filter. If you want to filter something good out of a substance, you don’t give it holes that hold onto everything. That’s just common sense.

My friend was willing to talk to women who were “spiritual” but not completely in line with him. Cessationists. Catholics. He was open to all sorts of Christians. For a time he even had a Jewish girlfriend, and I don’t mean a Messianic.

My friend has the stats. I have the wife. She and I agree; I did it right, and my friend has done it wrong.

One of the most destructive things women do is going after unsuitable men they think they can change. They do the same thing with shoes. If they’re cute, they buy them, even if it means surgery later. Most men look for women they don’t have to change, but my friend has done it the female way.

My wife and I discussed my method and my friend’s method, and of course, we agreed that my way was the right way. We agreed that it was like what Yeshua does.

There are people out there who think Charlie Kirk is a great man of God because his death inspired a lot of people to go to events and get baptized. But how many of those people will be Christians 5 years from now? How many who will stick around will be baptized with the Holy Spirit, speak in tongues, and be transformed and separated from the world?

A tiny percentage. I promise you.

Also, you can’t become a great man of God after you die. If a million people got baptized because a cocker spaniel died, it wouldn’t make the cocker spaniel a man of God. You are defined by what you do while you’re alive. You can’t become a man of God after you die.

Here’s another problem for the people who want to put Kirk on a pedestal: he thought Catholicism was great, and he took his family to masses. He also hid it, which is not very honest, presumably because he knew the Christian right is overwhelmingly non-Catholic.

A lot of non-Catholic Christians think this is a slander Candace Owens made up, among her many other slanders and fantasies, but it appears to be true. His best friend (he has so many best friends now) says Kirk was drawn to the Catholic Church and loved masses.

Catholicism is WRONG, and I don’t mean wrong in small letters. It’s WRONG. It credits Mary with a type of godhood, which is completely false. It teaches people to wear charms, which come from pagan religions. It teaches people to pray to dead people, which is necromancy. It discourages the gifts of the Holy Spirit. It contains so many major errors, many ex-Catholics who have become charismatics say they were Catholic but not Christian.

God doesn’t put people in the Catholic Church. He pulls them out of it.

Conservative Christians have a lot of fun with the delusions of leftists, but delusion is spreading among us, too. The Charlie Kirk delusion is a glaring example. We also have a problem with Jew-hatred. It used to be confined mostly to the left, but Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are helping it spread on the right. Conservatives who claim to be Christian but know nothing about the Holy Spirit are easily fooled, so it’s not hard to pull them into Hitler’s camp.

You know who was a big supporter of big-tent Christianity? Constantine. He made Christianity (or a pagan corruption of Christianity) the official religion of the Roman Empire. He was a Catholic.

How did that work out?

Go look at the Revelation.

Istanbul was the capital of the Roman Empire. Why don’t we call it Constantinople any more? Because it’s in a Muslim country where big-tent Christianity failed.

The seven churches of the Revelation were in what is now Turkey. Every last one of them. Who ended up fighting the so-called Christian monarchs of Europe? Turks! Muslim Turks.

Turkey is now a Muslim nation, it has been for centuries, and its government is antisemitic. Many of the common people also hate Jews.

If Yeshua visited Turkey today, he wouldn’t have seven huge churches to talk to. They’re gone. But he could go to Istanbul and see the Hagia Sophia, the huge Catholic church Muslims took over, desecrated, and turned into a mosque.

A person who helps 30 people obtain a lasting relationship with the Holy Spirit, and to obtain salvation, is doing great. Yeshua is God, and he didn’t do much better during his earthly life. A pop minister who helps hundreds of thousands obtain show salvation for selfies and Tiktoks is actually harming people.

The word says this:

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:

Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

That didn’t suddenly change because America was founded or people had big events after Charlie Kirk died. Salvation is still for the few.

This follows:

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

If you know people who answered altar calls and still fit into the world and embrace its culture, you know fake Christians. They existed in ancient times, and they still exist.

Real Christianity is never going to be popular, and our job isn’t to make it popular. Yeshua himself couldn’t do it. Our job is to spread the real thing and not worry about the people who reject it.

Delusion will increase on the left and the right because leftists hate Christianity and conservatives think they know better than Yeshua. It’s a bad situation. Real revival isn’t coming. I don’t care how many people get on their knees on athletic fields at special post-assassination events. It was never about quantity. It has always been about the truth.

If I annoy big tent Christians by writing these things, it’s a good sign, because they have always been a problem.

That’s the Only Part of You That Will Feast

Today is Sunday, so I won’t be here long.

We don’t cook anything that requires effort on Sundays. This morning I fried up a piece of country ham and two eggs, and because we don’t cook anything that requires effort on Sunday, I added a frozen Fresh Market croissant the store gave us for nothing. We never buy loaves of store bread. My wife makes bread for us. We ran out, and she can’t fix more until tomorrow.

I used Meacham ham which I ordered for my ham search. Along with Meacham, I’m testing Benton’s, Broadbent’s, Penn, and Newsom’s. I already eliminated Broadbent’s. I made red eye gravy with the drippings.

Meacham ham has a unique side flavor, and it smells a little funny before cooking. That threw off my analysis at first.

The smell goes away during cooking, the flavor is strong and tasty, the salt level is just right, the ham isn’t too dry and there is a reasonable amount of fat. It’s very nice.

The other companies are up against the wall now. Newsom’s is nearly perfect, but it costs about twice as much as Meacham, it’s not aged as long, and they won’t slice and bag it. The more I try Meacham, the more I think it’s just as good. Penn and Benton’s might be great. Benton’s can’t match Meacham on price, though. Penn is pretty close.

Penn is sending me a half-ham, sliced and bagged, for $64. It’s only a few pounds, so it doesn’t weigh half as much as a whole ham, but they keep the bones and probably some stuff I would remove and discard. I don’t know if it’s honest to call it a half ham or not, but there is a lot of waste in a whole ham, so maybe it is.

The good thing about butchering a whole ham is that you get a hock and a bone for beans or soup, so losing that is a significant hit.

I ate this in front of my baby son. I guess that was mean, but he can’t have country ham. He will be raised on it, though.

That’s all I got. Enjoy your Sunday.

This Salt Needs to Lose Some of its Saltness

The country ham search continues.

I tried to get some ham from Benton’s in Tennessee, but I made a mistake and ordered the wrong thing. The photo on the site was more than a bit misleading, and somehow I either failed to read all of the copy or I read copy from another product. Anyway, I thought I was getting half a pound of ham slices, but I ended up with paper-thin slices of very old ham intended to compete with prosciutto.

It tastes fine, but I’m not a prosciutto or charcuterie person. My feeling is that if you can afford a fancy board, you can afford bread so you can make a proper sandwich.

Charcuterie is boring. It’s a fraction of a real dish. When you eat charcuterie, you’re eating ingredients.

I think peer pressure convinces people they like charcuterie even though they don’t. It’s not a legitimate course. It’s just scraps of meat on a board.

I contacted Benton’s because I thought they had made a mistake, and they are graciously sending me what I actually wanted. I just have to pay for shipping.

Meanwhile, my second package of Broadbent’s ham has arrived. The first samples I bought were very dry, unbelievably salty, and somewhat leathery in consistency. Also, I couldn’t taste much flavor. I ended up throwing some of the ham out.

Country ham is supposed to be salty, but the slices I received were not normal. It’s supposed to be a little tough, but it should fall apart when you chew it. You shouldn’t feel like a shipwreck victim trying to eat a shoe.

I tried the new package today, and it was better.

The ham is still very salty, but I don’t think it’s quite as extreme as the first package.

The texture is still tough, but it’s not like a hard piece of leather.

I was able to taste the country ham flavor. It was not the near-perfect flavor of Newsom’s, or the unique-but-still-classic flavor of Meacham, but it was good. A little better than the ham slices at Cracker Barrel, I suppose.

The slices were still too thin for me. The perfect thickness for fried country ham is 3/8″, and these looked like half of that. It’s meat. It’s not copying paper. Give the customer something to eat.

If I had to buy a Broadbent’s ham, I would slice it thicker, soak the slices in water for three days, and then store it in vacuum bags. The water would tame the salt and fix the dryness.

This would probably work, but I won’t be buying any more Broadbent’s ham, so I will never find out. Meacham is as good, or nearly as good, as Newsom’s, and it’s much less expensive than Broadbent’s, so I don’t have any reason to buy Broadbent’s.

I don’t know why Broadbent’s hams are so salty and tough. All hams are cured pretty much the same way. They are covered with salt. You would think they would all be equally salty.

Maybe Broadbent’s is using hams that are dryer and less fatty to begin with, or maybe they keep them at lower humidity.

I’m not complaining about the salt because I’m an ignorant person who thinks all country ham is too salty. I know what a ham is supposed to taste like.

The two last contenders are Benton’s and Penn. Both should arrive this coming week. In the end, I will have tried 5 brands of ham, and that will have to be enough.

My Rebuttal to Dale Carnegie

I had the funniest dream last night.

I use a lot of Internet forums because I have a lot of interests. I can’t just conjure up friends and relatives who can tell me how to wire up a guitar amp tube socket or change an oil seal on a tractor axle. I have to look elsewhere.

Something about me attracts insults and abuse. Internet forums are full of jerks. Anyone who participates in a typical forum will eventually be bullied and provoked. My strategy is to try to show humility and patience from the start, and I use self-deprecating remarks to keep the jerks from waking up, but to many jerks, humility and self-deprecation are like the smell of poop to flies, so they pounce.

Eventually, if someone will not leave me alone, I will respond in kind. I am much better at this than most people, and forum moderators don’t like it. You can let a complete ass insult you over and over for weeks, and you can count on forum moderators to leave him alone, but when you get fed up and snap back with a penetrating shot from a larger caliber, you get in trouble.

These days, more and more moderators are ignorant young wokesters, so things are worse if there is any kind of conservative or Christian smell to you. It doesn’t have to be overt; a slight hint will serve just fine to get you disparate and unfair treatment.

Some old crank has been needling me on a forum for saying it’s a good thing to expose people who give consumers a raw deal. It’s like he’s a dog and the neighbor’s shar pei is in heat. He can’t move on. I responded to his obnoxious remarks civilly several times, and he can’t shut up.

I quit going to the forum, but after a week or two, I decided to visit again, and he was still at it. I told him the first of the month was coming up, so I was glad I wasn’t paying rent on his head.

Personally, I would rent a house, not an efficiency, but let’s move on.

Now some woke kid moderators are sending me email messages. I responded once, and now I just put them in the Archived folder. Maybe I’ll read them in a month or two, or maybe I’ll use other forums.

There are some seriously non-woke forums out there, so that’s nice. One example is Arborist Site, for people who need help with forestry tools. Gun forums are also pretty good. I wouldn’t go near a Christian forum, because I can’t handle the self-righteousness from people who do nothing but quote fools like Joel Osteen and T.D. Jakes. Few things are worse than being scolded by ignorant, disrespectful people.

Some people are drawn to Christianity by a desire to change and get close to God. Many more, however, are drawn by the desire to be God’s Karens and HOA presidents. Yeshua was murdered by self-promoting, self-adoring Karens.

A Youtube preacher named Tom Fischer lectured me for criticizing TV preachers and their prosperity nonsense. Well, he lives in a camper that was a gift. I am not making fun of him. Poverty is no joke. But he lives in a camper, he has had this standard of living for many years, and he essentially called me an enemy of Christ for criticizing the prosperity gospel.

He told me I had discipline coming. I was living in a nice house. I had a wonderful wife. I didn’t have to work. I lived in a fantastic area with warm, kind people. Since he gave me his warning, I have had a magnificent baby son who brightens every day of my life. Things get better all the time.

As I have told my wife, if this is discipline, I want more of it.

He has a lot of company. A lot of people have told me God was either getting me or going to get me. Most ironically, Alberto Lee Santiago, the child-rapist pastor from my last church. He told me God didn’t like what I was doing. Within a couple of years, he was put in prison, his wife (who agreed with him) died from a brain tumor before he was sentenced, and of course, he lost his church.

His brother-in-law Sander was also enraged at me, although of course, he claimed he was praying for me. Sometimes I think that’s the ultimate Christian diss.

Sander was an illegal alien; maybe he still is. He got furious at me for calling Osteen a grinning jackass, which I stand by. He got even madder when I said illegal immigration was a Biblical curse, which is a hundred percent true. When Santiago was arrested (after doing his level best to discourage the victim’s mother from forgiving him), Sander posted a meme criticizing church members for abandoning their “shepherd.”

There are a lot of things a good shepherd does with sheep. What Albert did is not one of them.

I would like to see Tom Fischer and his wife in a big, beautiful house with a pack of cute kids playing around their feet, but it looks like the prosperity gospel is keeping him where he is. It was designed by Satan to do that. It works beautifully. As Satan’s tools go, it is unsurpassed in its effectiveness.

The more you give to prosperity preachers, the less you prosper, and the less you can give to the poor. That’s the scheme, in a nutshell. In a way, it’s almost beautiful. So simple and powerful.

Fischer also lays into the Jews all the time, which is beyond disappointing.

Anyway, that’s just an example of what happens when I speak up around Christians. Religious people murdered Yeshua, and they want to get rid of everyone else who shoots down their idols and superstitions. Jewish or Christian, it’s the same kind of people.

I really hope no one hits me with “Judge not” for the rest of this year. I don’t know if I’ll be able to restrain myself. I’m going to get a shirt that says, “‘Judge not’ is not the only verse in the Bible.”

Like Yeshua and the apostles, I judge people all the time. It’s extremely helpful to me and whoever hears it. I don’t care who the person is; the other day I judged Billy Graham for saying Muhammad Ali was a follower of Jesus Christ. That was a stupid and dangerous thing to say. I don’t care how many people went to Graham’s crusades.

Billy Graham is probably close to the top of the Christian idol totem pole. He was so relentlessly inoffensive, he drew the admiration of hundreds of millions. What did Yeshua, an unpopular person, say about popularity?

If I’m willing to knock Billy Graham, you know I’m hard core.

My wife saw Graham say this, and she was mortified. We listened to him, and the impression we got was that he denied the necessity of the cross, which could mean he was not saved. Denying Yeshua is the absolute surest and quickest way to lose your salvation.

Muhammad Ali, a Muslim, named himself after a pedophile rapist gangster who was physically dirty and encouraged his followers to perform acts of terrorism against non-Muslims. Ali was no follower of Yeshua. He was an extremely ignorant man, he lived a life of defeat, and he is almost certainly in hell. Graham saw no point in correcting him. In fact, he reinforced his eternal itinerary by lying to his face. Great job, Billy.

Believe it or not, warning people about hell is important. Is it controversial to say that? Can that possibly be? Slap yourself hard in the face and think about it.

To get back to my dream, I dreamed someone emailed me a link to a new forum, and I visited it. All of the posts were reposts of things I had written on forums. All the horrible non-woke things that had sent snowflakes running for their weed stashes and power crystals.

One of the posts was very funny. The guy who created the forum was furious at me for using the phrase “crazy people.” You can’t say “crazy” any more, even if you’re describing a bona fide psychotic who has to be kept strapped to a wall.

This useful, accurate phrase is considered offensive. That’s just crazy.

God has blessed me for giving up secular entertainment. I did it earlier this year, and although my life was very good beforehand, it is much, much better now. Years ago, he blessed me for giving up social media. Now I wonder if he wants me to quit using Internet forums.

I feel like I need them for the purpose of getting information, but that may be an excuse. I also use them for socializing.

Now that AI is freely available, I have found that it’s a better source of help than Internet forums. Forum people like answering questions about which they know nothing. They also drag threads off topic. Maybe I should drop forums and stick with AI as much as I can.

Participation in the world’s culture is unequal yoking, so it has to be minimized.

Is using AI unequal yoking? I hope not. It’s pretty woke, i.e. deluded. AI bots aren’t people, though, so I treat them like the inanimate objects they are. I don’t try to get along with them. I don’t use good manners. I never joke with them. It would be like trying to befriend a shovel.

The world’s culture is a minefield. It was designed by Satan. He puts little temptation mines in TV, fiction, movies, sports, music, and the news. When you walk through it, the mines blow up under your feet. Demons get permission to enter your home and go after you and your family.

The most pleasant thing about abandoning secular entertainment is that it put an end to my lust issues. I didn’t realize it, but websites that don’t seem sex-related have little bits of erotic content in them designed to pull you further astray, and it works. News sites are full of erotic clickbait about whorish female celebrities. This one or that one shocked the crowd at Sundance by going to a viewing naked! This one has an incredible “bikini bod” at 57! That one wore a CHEEKY dress to the Golden Globes! It’s all over sites like The Daily Mail and Yahoo News.

I don’t need to see professional sluts all day. Sorry; that’s what they are. I wouldn’t let them be part of my social circle or walk onto my property, so why read about them on the Internet?

I didn’t realize reading the news or watching shows like Clarkson’s Farm could lead to problems with lust, but it does. It must lead to other demonic issues, too.

Being delivered from demons is wonderful, but it’s a second-rate blessing. The better blessing is to avoid having demons in the first place. Secular culture brings them in, and if they are cast out and you go back to secular culture, they enter you all over again.

I would rather stay free than watch Fox News. The Catholic news channel.

Any channel where more than one host refers to an old celibate socialist elected by gays as the holy father is suspect.

I’m not going to fit in with this world. If I started to, it would be a sign that I had backslidden and lost my relationship with God. Changing my behavior to avoid offending won’t help. The real offense is my existence. I’m like a Jew. The problem people have with me isn’t my behavior. It’s my existence itself.

Currying favor won’t make anyone like me. It will just strip me of the favor of God and grieve the Holy Spirit.

If I try to make people like me by being less honest, they will still hate me, but I will lose my relationship with God.

Go ahead and dislike me. They will never build a microscope powerful enough to detect my respect for your opinion of me.

Don’t Give Everything Away Just Yet

Rapture fever is apparently peaking again.

I believe in the rapture. It is described clearly in the Bible, and there are also lots of symbolic references to it.

I have no problem with the rapture. In fact, I am counting on it, because I am not eager to die of old age on a planet that has descended into wholesale, violent, sadistic persecution. I don’t want my wife and son to be stuck here, either.

I’m convinced rapture-deniers have the poorer view. On the other hand, it is fatiguing to get excited, repeatedly, about a possibly-imminent rapture and then find out it’s not happening. It’s like sitting in a restaurant, watching waiters stroll by with pizza after pizza you mistakenly think is headed for your table.

In 2015, in a dream, I experienced the rapture with my late mother. I heard the trumpet and everything. It gave me hope I would not be stuck here much longer. It is now 2025.

In 2020, I had another rapture dream, but it was symbolic. I thought it might point to a rapture that would take place at around Christmas of that year. January came, and I was still here.

I think both of these dreams were related to Christmas, because in the 2015 dream, I was in my grandparents’ living room. That is the room where my cousins and I opened our Christmas presents. The memory of opening presents in that room is the strongest memory I have of it.

Also, if you think about it, the rapture is like Christmas. The first Christmas was the first time Yeshua came to earth as Messiah, and the rapture will be the second time. A second Christmas.

I used to keep up with other people’s rapture dreams on Youtube, but it became very difficult because an eccentric woman put up a channel which stole and reposted other people’s videos. This effectively blocked out other people’s content unless she liked it. I think she did this to make money.

I quit searching for videos and went on with my life, so I lost touch with other rapture enthusiasts.

Recently, a friend of mine reposted a video from a young man who said he had dreamed of the rapture. He said Yeshua had told him he was “right at the door.” He said he had heard the dates September 23 and September 24 over and over.

He said Yeshua kept saying, “My wrath is just,” meaning the tribulation was ready to fall on the world.

He also said God spoke through him to his father, telling his father that his grandfather was in heaven, and the grandfather wanted the father to pray for the father’s siblings because they were not saved.

This all sounded pretty good, except for a few problems that made it incompatible with the truth.

First of all, the rapture did not come, unless it was tiny. If so, I am in big trouble, because I am now in the tribulation.

Second, there is no reason to believe dead people know anything about what happens here, that they intercede for us, or that God would give us messages from them.

Predictably, there is a parachute to save the prediction from the date problem. People are saying Yeshua is coming on September 23 or 24 on the Julian calendar, which is 13 days behind our Gregorian calendar.

The obvious question is why he would use a calendar no one uses today.

The Julian September 23 is our October 6, so some people will hold out hope through October 7.

There is no getting around the dead people problem. Talking to the dead is forbidden in both Judaism and Christianity, except for old semi-pagan churches like the Catholic Church. It’s for witches and sorcerers.

In the Old Testament, only one dead person spoke to a living person. It was Samuel. Saul conjured him up, and Samuel told him he was cursed for it. Some people say it wasn’t really Samuel, but the Bible clearly says it was Samuel, so God must have permitted Saul to talk to him on this special occasion.

There is no example of a dead person talking to a living person in the New Testament. Elijah and Moses appeared with Yeshua, but they didn’t talk to anyone else. Resurrected people talked to the living, but they were alive.

In the Bible, God spoke to human beings through Yeshua and the Holy Spirit. I think there is also at least one example of a person visiting the throne room in heaven, meaning Yahweh spoke to him. I am not a great Bible scholar. Anyway, God spoke to people as Yahweh, the Holy Spirit, and Yeshua. As the Holy Spirit, he often spoke through living men. He also spoke to people through angels.

With the likely exception of the Samuel incident, which is something no one should ever try to copy, there is no example of God sending a dead person to talk to the living.

If God were speaking to the young man in the video, he would simply tell him his dad’s siblings needed intercession in order to be saved. He would not involve his grandfather. That would make no sense.

God didn’t tell the young man the rapture was coming on September 23 or 24 on any calendar. He didn’t give him a message from his grandfather. The information in the video came from somewhere else, and the whole video should be dismissed.

In comments below the video, Christians are oohing and ahhing in agreement. We have a terrible culture of gullibility, which is not faith. We try so hard to believe, we get used to accepting whatever we hear that seems to be positive for the kingdom. We swallow a lot of garbage. This leads to disaster for many of us.

Today, I see heathens gloating on the web, saying MAGA Christians are crying like babies because the rapture didn’t come this week. I don’t know if this is true; I haven’t checked. I didn’t know September 2025 rapture predictions were widespread, so I am behind the curve.

I have nothing but empathy for anyone who cries because the rapture hasn’t come. It seems like a rational response.

Although the video was not from God, it did contain some interesting information.

The video says that when Yeshua said people would not know the day or hour of his return, he was quoting past Jews who were talking about Rosh Hashanah, which is the Jewish holiday that started on September 23. It’s the day the Jewish new year starts.

I decided to look this up, since there is a lot of unvetted garbage out there regarding Judaism’s connection to Christianity.

It turns out there is something to it. Rosh Hashanah is one of the Jewish special days that starts on a new moon. Deep in the past, Jews did not assume the new moon was out there because astronomical charts predicted it. They didn’t go ahead with new moon festivities until two witnesses testified that they had seen the new moon.

This may be wrong, but: the web says the current Jewish calendar, which is very good, didn’t exist until a millennium and a half ago, and this is why they had to eyeball the moon.

Because the moon was sometimes covered by clouds, and clouds can last a while, the beginning of the new year could be moved back quite a bit, meaning it wasn’t just the hour, but the day, which was not certain.

Is this all correct? Do your own Googling and see what you think.

The idea that the date and hour were uncertain seems to be solid, but not so, claims that Yeshua was quoting well-known Jewish wisdom when he said, “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.” This may be a Christian embellishment.

The video also says something about Jewish weddings and abductions. The idea is that ancient Jews used to hold mock abductions at weddings, grabbing the brides and carrying them off to the ceremonies or something.

This appears to be fiction. Maybe someone can find proof that doesn’t come from a Christian source.

It makes the rapture look more plausible, because the rapture is Yeshua, grabbing his bride and taking him away with her. It is understandable that Christians will little regard for the truth would make something like this up. Christians have promoted enough lies to fill encyclopedias. They made up the saints, the immaculate conception, the rosary, original sin, baby-baptism, and the Seventh-Day Adventist rules against pork and shrimp.

No bacon-wrapped shrimp! Now that’s a sacrifice.

While I am sure the September 23-24 theory is wrong, because here I am, I have to say that I saw another September rapture video that was not as easily debunked. A lady who sounds like she is from Australia says her autistic son spelled out prophecies on a letterboard and told her he had seen her aborted daughter in heaven. She says he didn’t know she had had an abortion. She says he named the man who raised her and said he was in heaven. She says the boy couldn’t have known about him.

She does not call for a September 23-24 rapture. She says God clearly told her son “September 2025.” I’m assuming that’s Gregorian.

It would be impressive, if true, and for all I know, it is. But she could be making it up.

Here’s a great lesson for you: you can’t “read people.” You can’t tell whether people are lying or not. If you think you can, you’re delusional. The world is full of people who know exactly how to act to make others believe them and give them sympathy. Only the Holy Spirit can read people for you.

The lady in the video seems open, honest, and brave. She says things that tug at your heartstrings. Well, if I were a bored psychopathic liar in love with attention, I would look for ways to seem just as credible and sympathetic as she does. It’s not that hard. If it were, there wouldn’t be hundreds of millions of people doing it.

This lady could be a AI creation for all I know. I can’t find the original location of her video, or any other videos she created, anywhere.

I would be very happy if my family and I were taken this month. I don’t think we’re going anywhere on October 6 or 7, but if we do, it will ruin future October 7ths for Islamists everywhere.

I don’t think anyone can specify a date. I think what Yeshua said about days and yours probably still holds true, although it’s not certain. He fully expects us to know the time of the rapture, but it’s not clear how accurate he wants us to be. I think it’s reasonable to think we could be told the month when he will come.

I’m not worried about being wrong about any of this, because I know of no requirement that you believe in the rapture in order to be included.

I am ready to go. This place is getting crazier by the second. It looks like Candace Owens is now surpassing Hitler in her ravings about Jews.

Owens is an excellent barometer. The more approval she gets, the crazier our country must be.

As far as I know, Hitler thought Jews were immoral, subhuman parasites whose disloyalty (not the Kaiser’s obvious incompetence) caused Germany to lose World War I. What a terrible thing to do, if true. How wonderful Europe would be with Germans running it (sarcasm). As of right now, they’re just funding it.

Owens now says Israel is a “demonic nation.” Hitler didn’t go that far, unless my knowledge of history is even spottier than I think it is.

I can’t believe I live in an America where a crazy woman can blather blatantly, patently, shamelessly antisemitic lies, not be censored or fired, and get richer every day! Could this have happened even in 2015?

Most political commentators are silly, but Owens is genuinely dangerous. She is moving us toward an America where pogroms are everyday activities. Where will Jews go then? No idea. I don’t even know where I could go.

If the success of Candace Owens can happen, we can eventually have troops goose-stepping down Pennsylvania Avenue, saluting Fuhrer Carlson and Vice Fuhrer Owens as they pass the White House. No delusion is beyond us now. We could hold fair elections and put a fox terrier in the Oval Office.

Owens is a self-debunking liar. She wants us to think Israel killed Charlie Kirk because he was turning against Israel, which he was not, but she is much worse than she wants us to think he was, and Israel hasn’t had her killed. She thinks Jews control the media, but they haven’t shut down her horrendous podcast.

I’m genuinely sorry the rapture didn’t come. Take comfort in the knowledge that we won’t be here forever.

Welcome to Nonbinary Day Care, Little Tyler Routh Mangione

My baby son grew up this week. He is now 47.

Three big things have happened.

1. His crawl speed has increased by about 300%.

2. He tried to climb up our stairs.

3. We are pretty sure he was trying to say “Dad” in the car yesterday.

All of this took place over about two days. I don’t know what’s with this kid.

Yesterday, I planned to have a pleasant day of testing country ham and procrastinating, but I had to go to Walmart get a baby gate and a real playpen. It couldn’t wait until today.

The crawling thing was a shock. I used to be able to put him on the floor and come back and find him pretty close to the same location. Now we get–literally–two seconds before he drops the clutch and crawls completely out of the room. For the first time, if he is on the loose, we may not know where he is.

When we’re on the bed together, I have to grab one foot of his romper and hold it, because he may launch himself like a Trident missile to get at the stuff on my night table. He may also launch himself over the side completely, head first.

There is no warning at all when he takes off. Suddenly, he’s somewhere else.

I don’t know how anyone can crawl quickly. It’s hard on the limbs.

When I hold him by his romper, he keeps groaning and straining. He never looks back to see what the problem is.

My wife found him at the bottom of the rec room stairs, pawing at things I had left on them because I was too lazy to move them all the way to the second story. She had to move everything away from him.

Now when I receive .22 ammunition to try out, I’ll have to take it all the way to the storage room. Otherwise, he’ll turn himself into a human magazine.

On the way home from the trip to get the gate and playpen, he started saying, “Da da da da da da DA!” I have been trying to teach him to say “Dad.” I touch my chest and say, “Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!” He thinks it’s wonderful. It appears he is trying to imitate me.

My wife says she thinks it’s great because she’s a patriarchist.

If only a feminist would come, deprogram her, and save her from happiness. She, too, could have 7 cats named after famous socialists and witches, an apartment all to herself and a fatherless son, dated Seventies rainbow hair, and a bellyful of Zoloft, Klonopin, semaglutide, and fattening bagged organic snacks from Trader Joe’s.

Putting a gate on the rec room stairs may be hard because we have a high baseboard. I bought something anyway, and I’ll see if it fits.

Playpens are now called “playards.” It’s not a real word, it makes no sense, and it looks stupid. When I saw it, I smelled wokitude.

Turns out I was right. Evidently, suggesting a child can be put in a pen is non-woke, microaggressive, and extremely hurtful. In the view of utter pinheads.

A playpen is nothing like a yard.

I call it what it is: a playpen. I will always call it that unless I can come up with something that invokes colonialism and manspreading.

Why do young people have to opt for idiocy every time? Is there anything millennials can’t ruin?

We already had a playpen for him, but it was no good, because it wasn’t a real playpen. It was a bassinet. The mattress can be lowered close to the floor, so that supposedly makes it a playpen. No; it’s just a weird bassinet. It’s small, and he can’t be expected to learn to walk on a foam pad.

I wonder when they’re going to come up with a new word for “diaper.” Maybe “pooyard.”

“I was chestfeeding little Lenin Snoqualmie when I realized zhey needed a fresh, sustainable, gender-neutral, tuck-friendly, soy fiber pooyard.”

This brings me to disturbing woke baby names. My buddy Mike already has granddaughters named Fern and Wren. I am not kidding. A boy is on the way. This was Mike’s chance for a normal name.

I won’t give you time to brace. They chose “Oak.”

Fern, Wren, and Oak. Where is Christopher Robin?

I almost miss the days when all liberals named their kids Dylan.

Oak isn’t a name. I don’t care if there have been people named Oak. There have been people named Raspberry and Osprey. Doesn’t mean these are real names.

Here is his future:

1. “Could you repeat that for me? Again?”

2. “Class, I thought I told you to stop throwing Oak on the ant pile.”

3. “Is it okay if I call you by your middle name?”

4. “Honey, I’m just not comfortable with ‘Oak, Junior.’ Let’s pick something else.”

I hope he’s big and strong, because he will need to be. A boy named Oak.

They gave him three names plus a surname, and only one is normal. Unfortunately, the normal name is sexually ambiguous. By design? Wouldn’t surprise me.

You have to give a kid an escape hatch unless you like putting cold washcloths on black eyes.

It was predictable that they wouldn’t consider “Michael,” even after all the things Mike has done for them and paid for. It fits in perfectly with all the things I have heard about them.

My understanding is that his son is a very smart and talented young man and an extremely conscientious and dedicated father. Mike says he is very concerned about morality and tries to improve himself. He appears to have a blind spot in one area, though.

Seems like an undeserved slap in the face to me, but what do I know? Mike would have been on cloud nine, but never mind. I would have loved to hear they named the baby after him.

I would have given my son my dad’s name, but because of my dysfunctional upbringing, hearing it makes my blood pressure spike. It’s like I’m a baby sparrow in the nest, and my dad’s name is the shadow of a hawk flying over. I gave my son my grandfather’s name, and I told my wife we should give the next one her dad’s name.

She rejected that, however, because he did not behave all that well in life. She has demoted him to middle-name status.

Christians name children to honor older people they know, or Biblical figures. Leftists name children to one-up other leftist parents.

Leftist 1: Our son has an Algonquin Indian name.

Leftist 2: Be better. My unassigned offspring has a sub-Saharan click-language name.

Leftist 3: How 2020 of both of you. We chose “Sinwar Bud Light Luigi.”

Is the last-names-first fad over with? Are leftists still naming their daughters awful things like Wilson and Flannery?

I am not in love with my first name, but it’s not bad, and at least it’s a name. It’s much more dignified than I am, so that’s a win.

“Tyler” is probably trending among leftists right now.

I think I should take a page from an old Bloom County strip and name a son Trump T. Trump. Or Reagan T. Trump.

It’s startling to see a baby make sudden leaps in development. Of course, it’s encouraging, but it also reminds me he will only be a baby once. When babyhood is gone, it’s gone. It has to be savored while it lasts.

We will try to teach him to have a little gratitude and respect instead of criticizing and putting us on trial every day of his adult life while expecting us to support him and do things for him well into his thirties. I hope it works, because I have seen what happens when it doesn’t.

Things are just about ideal here. My son is a joy. My wife and I love each other; we are more like parts of each other than separate beings. God’s presence comes to us over and over. Our area is peaceful. We lack for nothing.

Everyone was miserable back in 2020, but we both loved it. Then we found each other in 2021, and while a lot of people were worrying and being held prisoner in their own homes by Democrat governors, we were having long video calls, praying together, getting married on Zoom, and flying to exotic destinations to be with each other. Every year has been better than the last. As happy as we were with just each other, we are even happier now that we have a baby, and we expect every new baby to make us happier still.

God keeps giving us correction, and I believe anyone who keeps receiving and applying his correction will find that his life gets more pleasant as years pass. I am optimistic because I have a loving benefactor who is patient, eager to bless, and slow to punish. He has been right about everything.

Today we will be taking the baby to the dermatologist for a followup, and then we plan to go to our favorite restaurant: Costco. We hope to be home when the anniversary ring I bought my wife comes back from being resized.

If you’re not happy, keep asking God to tell what you’re doing wrong. It worked for the ancient Jews, and it is certainly working for us. God loves you as much as anyone else, so he is ready to start when you are.

Creative Cure from Meacham Hams

A third type of country ham has landed on our porch: Meacham Hams of Sturgis, Kentucky! I fried up two small slices, and we tried them.

The raw ham scared me a little. I am used to country ham smelling a certain way. A little bit like bacon. A little smoky, if smoke is used. A fermented umami smell which is hard to describe. Sort of like a Slim Jim.

The slices I bought from Meacham didn’t smell much at all. When I used to buy Gatton Farms hams, I could tell there was ham in the boxes before I opened them.

The slices I bought today had an aroma that surprised me. It was just a little bit like dog poo.

I wasn’t disturbed. I know nobody cures hams with dog poo, and I have had hams that smelled like manure and mold.

There was also a faint odor that reminded me of maple syrup. Maybe it has something to do with the sugar in the cure.

I put a small amount of water in a pan and boiled the slices for around 45 seconds per side. The purpose of this is to cut the salt and make the slices moister, but my grandmother used to slice and fry, period.

Important to point out up front: the fried slices did not smell like dog poo.

This is a mild ham. It’s mild by country ham standards, not Oscar Mayer standards.

On the saltiness scale, it is below Newsom’s and the Broadbent’s slices I bought. If Broadbent’s is a 10 and Newsom’s is an 8, I call this a 6. Still very salty, as it should be, but toward the lower end of the country ham spectrum.

I consider this a good thing, because this ham should not need any water in the pan, and that saves time. Also, water probably carries off some flavor.

It’s not tough at all. It’s easy to chew, but it has the texture of a true country ham. It’s not like a canned ham. It’s not dry, either.

The texture of Newsom’s made me think of cheese for some reason. It sort of collapses between your teeth like the center of an aged prime rib eye. The Meacham slices don’t have as much of this quality.

It has a nice, acidic country ham flavor, but I would say it’s a little less pronounced than Newsom’s. The Broadbent’s slices didn’t have much flavor.

On the whole, it has a flavor all its own. Newsom’s produces hams with a very well-executed typical country ham flavor. This one is just a little different.

At first, I thought I liked Newsom’s better, but this ham grows on you. I stopped eating, and then I kept going back to finish it.

Here is my conclusion: this is a great ham, but if you want perfect textbook country ham just like your granny’s, you will prefer Newsom’s. If you are open to something a little distinctive but still completely authentic, Meacham is something you should try.

If you like country ham, but you are tired of dealing with excess salt, and you want a flavor that is slightly less intense, Meacham is probably ideal for you.

In terms of quality, I think there is no difference.

The price can’t be beat. Nobody else will send you a year-old proper country ham for this kind of money.

I think this is an excellent product that fills a need. Not everyone wants a hard core ham, but if you try to find something a little milder, you are likely to end up with a fake made for New Yorkers and Californians. Meacham makes a mild ham, but it’s for real. Also, the unique flavor gives people a new option without going outside the genre.

Anyone who likes country ham should try Meacham Hams. They deserve credit for doing their own thing.

MORE

I sliced my Newsom’s ham and soaked it in water for two days under refrigeration. Today I tried it.

I was afraid I was ruining it, but it’s better. It’s slightly less salty, and it’s juicier. I recommend this approach.